


Cosmic Fireworks

by WalkerLister



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: Revolution of the Daleks, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, I am sad about it all, I hate summaries but there is a plot in that things will happen, I need this for catharsis, I've tagged it thasmin but i'm not sure how textually explicit it will be, but you've seen the episode right i mean look at the tension, even though i loved that, i will cry thinking about it, one does not simply escape from prison and then not face the consequences, they both need hug and i mean a proper hug not a head hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:08:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28513947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WalkerLister/pseuds/WalkerLister
Summary: She had run at the first possible moment. Back to the humans. Back to her Fam.And they had been waiting and waiting and waiting.Ten months.'Could’ve been worse', part of her had thought. 'But Doctor', the other part had chimed in, a nasty voice too prevalent in her mind of late, which had whispered words of woeful wondering, despairing wondering on those longest nights, 'They thought you might be dead. You’ve lost them now.'The Doctor and Yaz post-revolution of the daleks.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 33
Kudos: 59





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I really need to work through how I felt after that special, tbh I've spent most of my time so sad at the boys' departure which hit me way harder than I thought, but I also needed to think about how they just ignored the prison thing and how the Doctor just tried to cover it up and how Yaz is very annoyed with her so here's... this. This is going to be in parts, idk how many but I know what's happening. Honestly I just needed to try and help myself out so apologise if this does not make sense, I genuinely have no idea, I feel like the tenses are all over the place, but anyway... Enjoy 😊

Decades apart.

Decades of wondering, of speculating, of _longing._ Decades spent waiting, questioning whether the wait would be eternal, if reunion would ever…

Decades spent in solitary creating friends from enemies. Each and every one the figment of her own mind, her own conjuring just for a glimpse of the friendly amongst the familiar. But there were no friends in prison, only enemies, not until Jack…

And then, the waiting was over, the first reunion came, the comfort and the silence which was not quite silent, not like her cell had been silent. Silent and cold and steely. No, the Tardis’ silence had been a sleeping silence, her ship waiting in its own right for its thief to return. And she had, touching the pillars and the controls and brushing the glimpse of a past self in the actions. Herself before Gallifrey, before the Master, before prison… like reaching out across the time streams for who she once was, not knowing who she now is, but not quite reaching.

_You’re okay now, yeah?_

_I guess we’ll find out._

Too terrified in that moment to ponder the question, too impatient for reunion part two. Three for part two who the Doctor desperately wanted to see, had been seeing in her mind for decades and whose countenances were getting far too blurred around the edges for her liking. The wasting away of time waiting for a possibility, perhaps, or perhaps the monotony of a place like prison peeling away at the thin veneer of patience she possesses, eating away bite by bite at her commitment to _stay strong._ She did not like prison, prison is not suited for the runaway, the one who runs from themselves, trapped within four walls, the one who seeks people to surround herself with so as not to be alone in enforced solitude.

So, she had run at the first possible moment. Back to the humans. Back to her Fam.

And they had been waiting and waiting and waiting.

Ten months.

 _Could’ve been worse,_ part of her had thought. _But Doctor,_ the other part had chimed in, a nasty voice too prevalent in her mind of late, which had whispered words of woeful wondering, _despairing_ wondering on those longest nights, _T_ _hey thought you might be dead. You’ve lost them now._

And she had. She had lost the boys. She had lost Ryan- amazing, incredible Ryan. She had lost, Graham, too, a good man too good to leave his grandson. And even though Yaz remains, the Doctor fears she might lose her, too.

She wants to confront it, hang onto Yaz before it is too late, but one heart is happy, and one is sad and there is no space for anything but those emotions right now. Happy Yaz is there, sad the boys are gone. The Fam is no more. The space between the two hearts seems to gape open.

She wants to fill it with hope. She loves hope. Hope is her _thing. I won’t disappear again,_ she had reassured Yaz, but any trust Yaz might have once put in such a phrase was gone in ten months of waiting, and Yaz had not been fooled. She needs to follow through on that promise now. She should confide in Yaz like she had not confided in her Fam before, reluctant to tell them any more about herself than she wanted lest things slip beyond her control, not until she had opened up to Ryan on the Tardis steps. She should tell Yaz, now, what has happened to her, where she has been, not brush off steely solitude as ‘space jail’. Stars know the woman deserves it. The Doctor is not a fool, she had seen the papers and post-it notes littering the surfaces of the other Tardis, had felt that guilt and regret dig its claws in even deeper, slicing through her ever since she had slid between the Tardis doors and been welcomed with a shove after decades of wanting to be drawn closer.

She wants to desperately cling to Yaz, _her_ Yaz, brilliant can’t-have-a-universe-with-no-Yaz Yaz, but her fingers tremble ever so slightly, she feels as if there is still grease in her hair even though it is freshly washed, and her head is buzzing from all that has happened. The adrenaline which had flooded her in facing off Daleks, _that’s what I do,_ which had given her an identity she could grasp onto, hold in its familiarity, work through anger in her no compromises approach to the big bad enemy, is fading fast.

The Tardis doors close behind the boys for the last time.

Jack had wanted to know if she was okay.

_I guess we’ll see._

She curses herself the procrastination now.

She’s had worse, she’s had longer, but she’d had herself, then. Being thrown in a prison cell when she had only recently lost herself. Confronted with cold silence and possible eternity. It had been daunting, to say the least. And now Yaz needs her, and she needs herself, but she is lost.

“So, we doing this planet of Meringues, then?” Yaz asks her, but her voice is hoarse and quiet and there is no amusement in it.

The Doctor clears her throat, tries to get rid of that dusty air of the prison which seems to be perpetually stuck in the back of it, coating her insides. “Nah, don’t think I fancy it now. Do you?”

“Nah.” Yaz replies, and the Doctor allows herself to slump against the console like a marionette with its strings cut.

“What now?” She asks, even as she should be the one deciding. She is free, but suddenly, freedom feels… terrifying. She had obliterated the Daleks and it had felt _good._ So long without inaction and there she was, able to diminish them to _nothing_ as she has been diminished to nothing, not knowing who she is. But that is what is terrifying. Hate had filled in empty space needing to be filled with careful discovery. She is so tired, now, and that terrifies her because, were they to stumble into an altercation she does not know what she might do. Her mind feels fragmented, it feels like those winding, whispering Remnants that had confronted her upon Desolation, mocking her with the tale of the Timeless Child, slippery, elusive, the truth but not quite the whole of it. All is a mess. The Doctor is not herself. She does not know who she is. She wants to run. She wants to hide in the Tardis. She wants her Fam. She wants the truth. She wants decades back. She wants to erase ten months.

But right now, she is paralysed. Waiting for an answer.

Yaz does not answer. The Doctor feels the pressure of her gaze as Yaz glances her way. There is so much unsaid, but she cannot find her voice.

“Docto-”

Suddenly, the Tardis jolts into movement, and Yaz and the Doctor scramble to grab purchase on the console. The Doctor looks in confusion to see the lever down. The Tardis is in flight.

“What?”

For one horrible moment, she fears the Judoon have caught up with her again. She did, after all, exit prison without permission. But then, no, the last time they had teleported in and teleported her out once more, left her stranded without her ship aboard that floating rock of a prison.

“What’s happening?” Yaz asks her, clinging to the console with desperation.

“I- I think that Tardis is doing this.” The Doctor says. She glares accusingly up at the main pillar. “Oi! Where are you taking us?”

The Tardis bleeps reassuringly but it does not do much to quell the Doctor’s reservations, in the circumstances. When the ship eventually comes to a thumping stop, she and Yaz remain clinging to the console for a moment.

“What was that about?!” The Doctor demands of her ship.

“Where are we?” Yaz asks, face creased with confusion. She is blinking back the surprise, too, both of them suddenly thrown into motion after so long of nothing.

“I don-” The Doctor starts, but she abruptly stops when she sees the coordinates. “Oh.”

“What? What is it?” Yaz asks. Demands, really. Patience running thin. Anger simmering.

_When are you going to address that, Doctor?_

Not now.

More time ticks on, adding to ten months.

_We were worried about you!_

“It’s the cosmic firework cluster.” The Doctor says. She glances Yaz’s way in her surprise. “The one we watched with the boys. The nineteenth New Year’s.”

Yaz’s surprise is evident. “Oh. The Tardis brought us here?”

The Doctor wanders towards the door in a daze. Part of her expects three pairs of footsteps, but there is only one. Preferable to none. Preferable to the silence of a cell. Even if they are weighed down with questions. Both of their footsteps weighed down with all they have not said to each other yet. The Tardis hums comfortingly. The Doctor barely hears.

The doors come open with a small tug, and then laid before them both is a nebula of sprawling beauty. Colours burst and fade, live and die and then live and die, perpetually born, perpetually dying, exposing their truth to them both. Easy as that. They remind the Doctor of losses hundreds of times over. They remind her of the boys. They remind her of decades. They remind her of ten months. They remind her of a secret kept from her. Who even is she anymore except a let down to those she holds close? Who even is she but the victor over the Daleks, bathed in anger and a misaligned righteousness? Who even is she but a cosmic firework, constantly born, constantly dying? Is that all she ever is? 

“It’s as beautiful now as it was then.” Yaz remarks. The fireworks reflect in her pupils, mirror their wondrous being. She glances the Doctor’s way once more, mouth slightly open, brow slightly creased. They are closer than they have been in ten months and yet that space stretches like lightyears. “Feels different without the boys, but it’s still beautiful.”

Things have changed, but the cosmic fireworks are still beautiful. The _universe_ is still beautiful, even whilst it contains such horrors, such anger, such despair. These glimmers of beauty exist in their own right _next to_ the horrors; one does not eclipse the other. Even though sometimes it feels like they might.

The beauty is still there. It just needs to be found.

“Did she do this on purpose?” Yaz asks the Doctor.

“Yes, I think she most certainly did.”

The Tardis pings victoriously, and a small, genuine smile twitches at the corners of the Doctor’s lips. Not much but something. Something like hope, but not quite it. Words need to be spoken, feelings faced, absences accepted, but this is not the time for it. This is the time for revealing the beauty, a promise that it is there. A reassurance and reminder, to the both of them. Shadows lurk but so do cosmic fireworks.

“I really missed you, Yaz.” The Doctor confesses without even knowing she is doing so. She has said it once before, in a dingy lab in Osaka, but this is spoken from the hearts. Both of them. Happy and sad. It is a promise which she hopes Yaz understands.

“I missed you, too.” Yaz replies, eyes still on the cosmic fireworks, and for the first time in decades the Doctor experiences a flavour of who she once was, born anew in this body, sitting alongside the truth of who she is, by fact, a partner for it in feeling. Yaz’s words are as laden with emotion as her own but to both the women, illuminated by the cosmic fireworks, they are tinged in multi-chrome, a rainbow of colours rather than just shadows, for the first time in a very long time.

And that is all they say, for the moment.

They can wait a little longer whilst they bathe in the light of cosmic fireworks, constantly born and constantly dying, solid and tangible to each other. Almost touching.


	2. Black Hole Looming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, I've had severe writer's block and my mind has felt leaden and full of cotton wool all at the same time. Still does a bit, but I've managed to get this out, so I really hope it makes sense, I honestly have no clue myself!   
> Thank you to Anobii1992 for proofreading!   
> Hope you enjoy!

They keep coming back to the cosmic fireworks.

The Doctor is aware she is acting… erratic. Antsy. She keeps moving them on, from one place to the next, skirting the galaxy and the prison she had escaped from, and then turning the navigation to the cosmic fireworks once more. They represent hope to her, hope she is in desperate need of, hope she is struggling to conjure herself. Her head still feels cavernous, her hearts beat a strange combination of happy and sad, a sickening mix, but she keeps her feet moving on the fuel of that hope, even though she feels her engines are empty.

She should be looking for the truth of her own self, like Ryan told her to.

She should be confronting Yaz about ten months and time spent apart, like she needs to.

She should be doing more to hide herself from the Judoon, like she _has_ to.

But she just keeps on running.

They save lives, small things. She thinks the Tardis has caught on to her terror at the big, right now, almost like agoraphobia after so long between the same four walls. They save lives, and they keep on moving on every time, returning to the cosmic fireworks time and again. Sometimes she does not tell Yaz she has visited them. In the early hours of the Tardis when her muddled mind keeps her awake, the Doctor’s hands move to the controls almost on instinct, seeking out cosmic fireworks. She needs to keep going back to that hope that she cannot conjure up in herself. She needs to keep regenerating her energy from those fireworks, hoping one time it might kickstart her engines and she might finally be able to face what she needs to.

She can see Yaz is starting to flag, the young woman’s own emotions a dangerous mix within her, so much not said. But she has always been a coward, of that she is sure. A coward without an engine, right now, to run on. And saving small lives and pretending at normalcy is the rhythm both of them have fallen into, reluctant to face truths and feelings.

And in the down times it is easier to stare in the face of bright, stark, cosmic fireworks then address the shadows which lurk in the corners of her eyes.

They have started to take shapes.

It is not much at first, a glance out of the corner of the eye, thinking she might have mistaken something else for what she has seen, but then, they begin to grow and shift into shapes familiar through the tedium, the repetitive nature, of having seen them every single day at the exact same time in the exact same place, separated by bars, but still able to taunt each other.

Stone.

Wrinkled skin.

Slithering tentacles.

 _This is fine, Doctor, completely normal,_ she tells herself, not believing it but reluctant to admit it. It is just a… head wonk, that is all, decades of mundanity and her brains are a bit frazzled, trying to keep up with this newfound freedom, still shaking off the stationary time of prison.

_But you’re not even going that fast. This is a snail’s pace for you, all these small victories._

And so, she picks up the pace once more.

They furiously save races, then planets, then galaxies, and yet there they always are, in the corner of her eye from time to time. On the streets of Liverpool, on orphan planet twenty-three, and in the console room, too.

She cannot see Yaz sometimes for them, and that brings her up short, catches at her breath. Her hearts stutter in their beating, and she has to grab purchase of the console for a moment.

_What are you going to do, Doctor? Just keep running? Expect Yaz to keep up whilst you lose her from view?_

_You think_ this _is going to fix things? Make them disappear? Oh, Doctor. You can’t just make them disappear. Not these problems nor these visions._

_How poetic of you. Your problems conjured in the visages of past enemies._

“No.” She spits. Her hands are trembling against the console.

“Doctor?”

Yaz. Concerned. Weary. Impatient. Confused.

The Doctor turns her gaze towards the console and inwards. She is showing too much outwards. Yaz is being strung along on this merry dance and it is everything the Doctor has _not_ wanted for her. She had not wanted Yaz to see this- for any of her Fam to see this. She does not want to be anything but the tour guide to the bright and brilliant of the universe to Yaz.

She had wanted to be better. She had wanted to be someone without her past, no baggage to throw at the Fam, to capture the wonder in their eyes (and Graham’s slight bemusement, she had liked that too). The irony now is, painfully, that her past is now less known to her than ever before.

Huh. She really is losing control of it all, isn’t she?

The irritation and concern is in Yaz’s voice, and she cannot remove it. She should confront it, but she cannot do that, either. Not when she is not sure she can give Yaz the answers she will want, not without feeling as if this whole life has been one failure after another. A downward spiral.

“I was thinking.” She says, words tinted with a false hue of cheeriness which is fooling neither of them. She looks up, glancing Yaz’s way, and instead is greeted with gritty stone, and she blinks, twisting her head downwards to the console savagely. She tries to stop her hand trembling as she reaches for the levers. “Cosmic fireworks. There’s got to be more out there, somewhere. Doesn’t seem like such a bad chase, does it? How does that sound?”

_Please don’t ask me, Yaz. Please, be as cowardly as I am._

But Yasmin Khan would never. 

* * *

“Doctor?” Yaz asks, tone lifting in a question at the Doctor’s form huddled over the console, the ‘no’ spat out like a plea and a denial.

There was that old adage, a misguided myth perhaps, that doctors never got sick. They would always be there to help and never need help in return. Perhaps Yaz has been misguided by that principle, that _promise._ Perhaps she had been too beguiled by the Tardis and the adventures and the way starlight caught in the Doctor’s eyes when she spoke with a wonder easily shared with Yaz about the brilliance of the universe. So raptured by starlight Yaz had ignored the shadow of the black hole looming. It had eaten away at the light, bit by bit, until there had been nothing left and tears had shone in those eyes instead.

_Live great lives._

And now the Doctor was back, and Yaz should have been elated. Overjoyed. Months of refusing to lose hope, not accepting her grief as Graham and Ryan had accepted theirs, possibly more used to feeling it than she was, less afraid of its bite, less in love with the loss than she was. Months of all that, swirling in Yaz’s brain, rusting that steel bar of resilience which sits within herself, a promise after years of bullying and ostracization, and the Doctor had been back, stepping out the Tardis, smiling cheerily, as if she had never been gone, and all Yaz had felt was…

Desolate.

Desolate, like a tundra, or an abandoned planet, dead, life struggling to grow, emotions struggling to grow against the damage done. They had all coalesced inside her in such a violent way that, victim to nature, Yaz had simply felt shocked and empty. Desolate. Only after, when wild winds began to blow through the landscape did one emotion grow and grow and grow into a hurricane.

Anger.

And she had _shoved_ the Doctor because the gravity of the orbital pull had dropped in that moment, Yaz was sucked into the hurricane, into the tundra, and she had needed to do something with all the emotion inside of her.

It was that or hug her, and something had held Yaz back, the orbit still making itself known. Making itself known even as they had dealt with the daleks and corrupt businessmen, and then Graham and Ryan were leaving and Yaz could feel herself pulled closer in even as the boys fell to Earth, not ready to leave, not ready to let herself drop. Her planet of desolation growing plants again, turning towards the sun towards which they orbit, tilting their heads up to feel its sunlight, processing that she sun is _back_ and Yaz is beside her again, in orbit.

However, pestilence and desolation still mixes in the soil. Anger still breeds vicious animals which stalk Yaz’s heels, begging for attention. She needs to talk to the Doctor. They need to get some things straight.

But it seems the Doctor is struggling with her own creatures, too. The sun’s rays are becoming harmful, she is burning too bright, scorching the earth, causing a draught, wearing out the planet as they keep moving from place to place, with no explanation given as to why they now go so fast. And Yaz feels helpless to the pull. It scares her, and it also dredges up that anger that has rooted itself within her. This is not _fair._ The Doctor should explain more, she owes Yaz that at least, after all this time together and all this time apart.

But this was what she had wanted, right?

Right?

Travelling with the Doctor once more, that had been all she had thought about those ten months, and yet there is something… off, as if there was a step missing at the very bottom of a staircase. Off both within Yaz, her lingering anger simmering under her skin, and off both within the Doctor, too. Perhaps absence had made Yaz’s perception of the woman distorted, she had remembered certain shades of her and not others, memories hazed in romanticism, but now the Doctor seems more shadow than light, the shade casting longer lengths across her personality. She feels more fully formed in the worst way possible, for in being there and being alive, she feels further away than if ten months stretched like miles between them.

She had been shadowed before, a being thousands of years old cannot help but be gilded by shadow and light, but now they reach longer, the façade of her cheeriness is more unconvincing than it had been before, which is saying something when the alien had been stretched thin already, now, Yaz knows, because of Gallifrey and because of the Master.

But there is more to it, as if the Master’s hands had chipped away at her façade but another, more callous sculptor has taken up the chisel since and has cut in too heavy, chipping away too much in large chunks, and all that rock and rubble is falling to the ground and plumes of dust are rising in Yaz’s face, obscuring the truth of that anonymous desecrator.

She knows only that the Doctor had been in ‘space jail’, but what that means, to what extent it is casting these new shadows, remains unknown to Yaz, cloudy dust stinging her eyes. She battles with herself over this matter, her brain too much caught up in her own feelings. For so too can a being of twenty years old be shadow and light. Yaz feels older than that, sometimes. Perhaps that is what time travel does to you.

Worth it, though, Jack had told her. Worth the pain.

Is it, though?

Yaz’s rational side says no. So does her fight and flight instinct. The red raw feelings she has felt, the churning up of her insides to an emotional mulch, tell her that this is too much, she is going too deep, falling too fast. She should have stayed in Sheffield, with her steady job and her family and the prospect of a mundanity that would be comfortable and _safe_ rather than the unknown destination of a life with the Doctor which puts both her life and her emotions at risk.

But that life offers her new experiences, chances to grow and to help beyond the place that has always constrained her, a home comfortable but also… confining. Yaz has seen her darkest days there, has grown there, but needs to grow more, to see more, do more…. And who could resist the Doctor’s pull? She certainly can’t.

The Doctor was golden drops in the rain of Sheffield, falling from the sky but bringing more, bringing beauty and courage and Yaz had one small taste and she had wanted _more,_ wanted to drown herself in golden water, gulp it down, desperate. Let is absorb into her, learn from the golden water, grow from it, follow its lead, see its courage and find the courage within herself. The Doctor was the greatest role model the universe could have offered her, and not only that but the taste of golden water was addictive for another reason, the taste of something sweeter, needier, more desperate, something Yaz has smothered all this time, swallowed down.

But now the black hole looms, the sun is being sucked in, and Yaz is going with it, her little planet in its orbit of too many emotions, too much anger, too much _love,_ unable to leave. And for the first time, Yaz feels not only scared of her feelings in the way that realising they are there and she has to confront them would, but instead she feels _terrified_ of them in the way that they have settled like old rocks circles, unmoving, offerings to the sun which she has put on her pedestal, unmoving. There is nothing she can do about it. It is go down with the sun and nothing else.

She cannot save herself. It is too late for that.

But it is not too late for her to find out _why_ the black hole looms, for she is Yasmin Khan, she is a human being, and maybe she is only a small planet compared to a large sun, but she still has life, and she deserves as much as anything else to know the why as she goes down with the Doctor.

Head complaining from a headache building behind her eyes, Yaz sighs as the Doctor does not reply to her query, barely seems even to see her, her gaze turned inward. Golden rain is poisonous sometimes, she thinks. It upsets her head and her heart.

She is about to push again, open her mouth and as the three words she should have said ages ago, if she had been granted a moment to, _are you okay,_ but the Doctor speaks before she can.

“I was thinking.” She begins, and she finally looks Yaz’s way but does not seem to see her, and Yaz’s insides jolt at that. She blinks past the headache, eyes hurting as she orbits too close to a sun that is burning up as the black hole descends. “Cosmic fireworks. There’s got to be more out there, somewhere. Doesn’t seem like such a bad chase, does it? How does that sound?”

Yaz gapes, mouth opening and closing. Any moment now they are going to be plunged into darkness and she does not think the light of fireworks will help them, not anymore; their magic has faded. But the Doctor is already moving around the console, and Yaz’s anger simmers again.

_Just look at me! Talk to me!_

“Ah, here we go!” The Doctor announces victoriously, voice catching in the back of her throat, making it ragged. Ragged remnants of herself. “Oh! A new conglomeration! How about we try that one out?”

Before Yaz has a chance to say anything she is pushing down the lever with a slightly manic ‘off we go!’ and the Tardis is jolting into movement. Yaz leans forward, grabbing at the console hard, turning her knuckles white.

“Doctor, listen.” She implores, but the Doctor is bending over the console, inspecting readings and twiddling knobs that do not need inspecting or twiddling. Yaz bites the inside of her cheek. Her planet is imploding, there is a volcano erupting and she cannot stop it now, it has been simmering for so long, and she is so _sick_ of having to keep it together. Not when she is this concerned, not when she is this angry.

“Doctor!” She shouts, and that gets the Doctor’s attention. She freezes in her erratic actions, looking up at Yaz with her mouth slightly open. Yaz takes a steadying breath, her nostrils flaring as lava fills her chest. “What are you going to do? Keep ignoring me? Hope I’ll go away?”

The Doctor’s mouth opens even further and Yaz can see in her eyes there is knowing that what she is doing is harmful. She realises in that moment that as much as the Doctor always likes to take control of situations, perhaps she is always the most helpless one there, victim to her own need to help everyone, but never able to help herself.

This gives Yaz an idea and she steps closer, keeping a hold of the console as the Tardis continues to travel. “Doctor, please. What is going on?” She implores, making sure she holds the Doctor’s gaze now that she has it. “Please, tell me. _I_ can’t do this anymore, not like this.”

The Doctor’s eyes widen, and she seems to buffer for a moment at the possibility of losing Yaz, this sudden deal breaker. Yaz herself does not want to see it through, she feels sick at the thought, caught in orbit, but if that is what it takes, cruel as it is, to make the Doctor _look her way_ then Yaz is not above it.

The Tardis lands with a _thump_ as the silence between them continues. Although, it is not silence, it is a small string of tension that ties them, vibrating faster and faster, a low humming noise growing louder. It is in Yaz’s ears, she is deafened by it, waiting for the Doctor to fill the space with words.

The Doctor lets out a heavy breath, straightening, and Yaz thinks that maybe this _might be it,_ that finally they will _talk_ about things, and stop this running about, searching for answers and comfort in cosmic fireworks which die as soon as they are born.

That maybe the time might have come.

But then…

The Tardis is being doused in red light, and an alarm is blaring, and Yaz cannot comprehend it for a moment, the string of tension between them still resonating in her ears, but then the Doctor is muttering under her breath, looking around in alarm, and Yaz is snapped out of it, the alarms hitting her eardrums like sledgehammers. _So close._

“No.” The Doctor says, shaking her head. She looks down at the reading on the console and her face pales, looking ghostly in the blaring lights. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Doctor?” Yaz asks, heart thumping. “What’s wrong?” 

But of course, there is no answer from her, and all that happens is the Doctor pushes past Yaz, shoving her in the direction of the steps. Before Yaz can protest white beams streak through the air in front of them, in front of the Tardis doors, and Yaz takes another step back in alarm as three Judoon guards teleport into the ship.

“No! Stop!” The Doctor shouts, but the Judoon pay her no heed, pointing their guns in her direction. At that Yaz takes a step forward once again, her heart in her throat, her head buzzing.

“Judoon apprehension unit!” The one in the middle speaks, gravelly, loud, and full of pompous authority. “Escaped prisoner- the Doctor! Incompletion of life sentence! Further charge of prison escape.”

“No,” The Doctor spits, almost breathless. Yaz watches the side of her face she can see, the panic in her eyes, the unfiltered fear. _Life sentence?_

“You will be reprocessed into the prison!” The Judoon says, raising a small device in the Doctor’s direction and Yaz panics, stepping forward, placing herself in front of the Doctor. She hears an agitated ‘Yaz!’ in her ear but ignores the Doctor in a turning of the tables.

“No!” She says. “You’re not taking her.”

The Judoon’s eyes narrow. “Any attempt to hinder Judoon lawful enforcement shall be punished.”

“NO! Stop!” The Doctor shouts as the Judoon raises its gun at Yaz, and this time she physically _wrenches_ Yaz behind her. Yaz stumbles back, grabbing a hold of the Tardis to keep herself upright. The Doctor raises her hands up further, to either side of her head, into a reluctant surrender. Her eyes are flickering between the Judoon, a sure sign she is agitated, backed into a corner, a place the Doctor _never_ likes to be. Yaz wants her to do something, to think her way of it, and she thinks that is what the Doctor is about do when she opens her mouth to speak, but instead she says. “No. You’ll take me. _Fine._ But not Yaz. Let me take her home. She’s done nothing wrong. You know it’s only me you want. You know it’s only me you need.”

The Judoon consider this, eyes blinking as it grunts slightly, shifting. The gun it holds makes a feint thrumming noise, like it is charging up to shoot. Yaz wishes the Doctor would look at her in that moment but she does not, the back of her head all Yaz sees, and suddenly she feels like crying.

“The Doctor will be taken for processing.” The Judoon finally says, and before Yaz can even blink the small device it holds is aimed at the Doctor and then suddenly, in a flash of light not dissimilar to the explosion of a firework, she is gone. Three more after that, and so are the Judoon, and Yaz is left there, mouth agape, legs trembling, ears buzzing.

“Doctor.” She whispers, like a promise that has been broken.

_When have I ever let you down before?_

And Yaz is stranded, her planet out of orbit.

_I won’t disappear again._

But now the sun is gone, and the black hole still looms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... Too over the top with the metaphors there?  
> Thanks for reading, sorry about the cliffhanger! I had the idea maybe the Doctor would keep seeing the aliens she was in prison with ever since that photo of the weeping angel from filming back in December- from more recent stuff it's obviously not that but I thought I'd vibe with it. 
> 
> Tumblr: walker-lister  
> Twitter: @walkerlister1

**Author's Note:**

> Ahh so there's some hope there.... not for long mwhaha. Thanks for reading, please let me know if you enjoyed. Yaz's POV is up in the next part. I don't know when it will be, honestly, I'm supposed to be writing other things, and I have two assignments due in the next few weeks and I've barely started, so as you can tell things are going well! But writing is cathartic so I will finish it do not worry (I've already started)! 
> 
> Tumblr: walker-lister  
> Twitter: @walkerlister1


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